Renske Versluijs showcased her first collection as an independent designer during Amsterdam Fashion Week. She recently won the price for ‘most creative designer’ during the Upperground Festival in Amsterdam and presented her work through a performance.

 

The collection ‘I Object’ answers towards the growing dissatisfaction among women that do not recognize themselves in the way women are portrayed in Western visual culture.  

“We live in a patriarch society.” Renske explains. Over time women have conquered the freedom to express their femininity, which stands for modern in the West.  This is maintained through visual culture where fashion plays a huge roll. “I have noticed that the women in the West have the tendency to dress in the line of what is portrayed through visual culture, to adapt to a social norm.” 

We are inspired by what to wear and how to style ourselves through magazines movies, TV commercials, and the likes. It is indeed constantly all around us. It’s quite easy to submissively undergo and adjust towards what the norm is, probably mostly subconsciously. 

“Muslim women in Holland and in a lot of other Western countries that dress in a more concealed manner are perceived as traditional,” Renske proceeds. She then explains that she tries to find a different perspective on the female body in Western fashion. In her collection ‘I Object’ she creates silhouettes that guide the gaze of the other over the body inspired by values she gained by doing extensive research on how women experience clothing. A lot of these women she interviewed were Muslims that are dressed in different degrees of a concealed dressed body image.  

While looking at the collection your attention is easily drawn towards the textile design, or the combinations of fabrics. Through the use of colour and shape it is an almost delicate, very feminine collection with at the same time a very sophisticated feel. What is quite ingenious is the simplicity of the total look of the collection while it consists out of technically very complicated patterns. 

Her goal is to create more collections that create a different perspective within cultural systems to give people new insights into issues like gender equality. But above all to keep experimenting with textile, colour, structures and silhouettes. 

Photos by Simone van Rees.